ComPol Accepts Pistol Whipping in Certain Scenarios  

Recently, an incident at Maya Center in southern Belize saw a policeman pistol-whip a man who was wielding a knife. The knife was secured, and the man was later detained. But what about the officer who used his weapon to disarm and restrain the civilian? Today, Commissioner Williams faced questions on the topic and was accused of normalizing police assaults with weapons. He responded that while there are situations where he understands the use of pistol-whipping, there are times when it simply doesn’t sit right with him. Williams added that he has reached out for a donation of pepper ball guns to use in scenarios where pistol-whipping is not appropriate.

 

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police

“I don’t see how it can be viewed as normalizing something. If a police officer pistol whips somebody, certainly that is not going to fly with me, but if a police officer is acting in the course of his duty and has no other means and uses his hand that contains a weapon and hits someone with a view to calm that person down, I am not going to kill that policeman for doing so. At the end of the day, we have to look at situations based on the facts and the incident has its own facts. I have read the discourse on social media, and I do agree with some of the comments that we have to find ways to de-escalate issues. We do have a Use of Force policy which outline the entire process that police officers must follow in the de-escalation of an issue, but we all know that when you are confronted with situations, you tend to forget that training that you would’ve been taught and you just react based on your instincts. That’s generally human beings, but we have to give the police officers the tools that they need to be able to be more effective in responding to these type of issues. And so I’m happy to see that I had reached out to Lord Ashcroft following the Independence issue with Mr. Arzu and I had wrote a proposal for a donation from him to the police for pepper ball guns and he has generously agreed to donate to the police 50 of those. They have provided payment through Waterloo to the vendor and we are hoping to get those pepper ball guns in the next two to three weeks, and those are going to be issued to police officers and are going to be used as a means of de-escalation. How the pepper ball gun works is that the police is going to – if the person is behaving in a certain way – shoot you right here with the pepper ball gun and when it touches you, it explodes and it sends a scent – pepper spray – that quells you.”